Main menu

Posts Tagged 'Innovation'

As 2014 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on another exciting year: our proudest moments, smartest innovations, and continued growth. It’s been an incredible year being part of IBM, and we continue to broaden our reach while adding new capabilities to our portfolio of cloud services.

SoftLayer’s IaaS platform has become the centerpiece of IBM’s cloud portfolio, providing a scalable, secure base for the global delivery of IBM’s cloud services, spanning extensive middleware and SaaS solutions. IBM has either built or bought 100 cloud properties over the last five years, and SoftLayer is the foundation or the piece that brings it all together.

Expanding our Global Footprint
In January, IBM announced its $1.2 billion commitment to expand its global cloud footprint, including plans to open 15 new SoftLayer data centers. Our first data center to open in 2014 was in Hong Kong, followed by London, Toronto, Melbourne, and Paris, with more to follow. We also launched two data centers for U.S. government workloads in Ashburn, Virginia and one in Dallas, Texas. These data centers are reserved for government customers and will be certified for U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliance.

With our new international facilities, we’ve tripled our footprint in Europe and Asia. Expanding our physical presence in these geographies gives our customers SoftLayer solutions for workloads and data that need to remain local, while providing additional data redundancy options within key regions around the world. With our data centers and points of presence (PoPs) combined, SoftLayer is on track for world domination.

Hourly Bare Metal
Our bare metal cloud differentiates us by providing an ideal solution for the toughest workloads in the cloud, including big data and analytics that require high performance. For more than 10 years, we’ve been refining, pioneering, and innovating our bare metal cloud. This year we unveiled a new offering: new bare metal servers that are deployed in less than 30 minutes and billed by the hour. These hourly bare metal servers provide the raw performance of physical servers with shorter commitments, making it easier than ever to deploy computing-intensive workloads on SoftLayer at will.

Growth
In 2014, we’ve continued to experience incredible growth. Since being acquired by IBM, SoftLayer has added thousands of new customers at an average rate of 1,000 new accounts per month. To match our aggressive business growth, our employee base is expanding as well.

“We expected to almost double this year, and to almost double again next year," said SoftLayer COO Francisco Romero. “In Dallas, SoftLayer expects to hire workers to fill 250 new jobs by the end of 2015.”

In order to accommodate our growing employee population, we’ll be relocating our Dallas headquarters to a new space early next year.

We look forward to serving you from our new address, 14001 North Dallas Parkway.

Today marks the 15th anniversary of National Techies Day—originally started to encourage students to learn more about a career in technology.

To be honest, we get teary-eyed when we hear young techies say they want to be a computer programmer, engineer, or a web developer when they grow up. Techies define, redefine, and refine the world, and the future techies will push the limits further than we ever imagined. How exciting!

At SoftLayer, National Techies Day has a special place deep in our HeartLayer. If you frequent our blog regularly or follow us on Twitter, you’ve seen us mention “Innovate or Die” once or twice . . . or a hundred times. It’s our motto. And, really when you break it down, National Techies Day celebrates technology and innovation and the people that keep us moving forward; for without innovation, we truly become stagnant.

So this National Techies Day we’d like to thank all the trailblazers who came before us. For all those who were teased and called nerd and geek, we thank you; for now we proudly wear these classifications as badges of honor.

We’d like to thank all the tech CEOs for making it socially acceptable to wear jeans and t-shirts to work every day; I am literally wearing a SoftLayer t-shirt and jeans right now as I type, so thanks.

We’d also like to remind all the non-techies out there to give a big shout-out to your IT department techies for getting you back online when you get the dreaded blue screen or experience other equally terrifying “my PC is acting up” situations. (“Did you try turning it off and on again?”)

And finally, to all the kids out there who know how to operate every technological device at home better than their parents, let us just say, working in technology is totally awesome (!), and we can’t wait to see what great things y’all will come up with in the future.

“Forget about being a futurist, become a now-ist.” With those words, Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, ends his most recent talk at TED. What thrills me the most is his encouragement to apply agile principles throughout any innovation process, and creating in the moment, building quickly and improving constantly is the story we’ve been advocating at SoftLayer for a long while.

Joi says that this new approach is possible thanks to the Internet. I actually want to take it further. Because the Internet has been around a lot longer than these agile principles, I argue that the real catalyst for the startups and technology disruptors we see nowadays was the widespread, affordable availability of cloud resources. The chance of deploying infrastructure on demand without long-term commitments, anywhere in the world, and with an option to scale it up and down on the fly decreased the cost of innovation dramatically. And fueling that innovation has always been raison d'être of SoftLayer.

Joi compares two innovation models: the before the Internet (I will go ahead and replace “Internet” with “cloud,” which I believe makes the case even stronger) and the new model. The world seemed to be much more structured before the cloud, governed by a certain set of rules and laws. When the cloud happened, it became very complex, low cost, and fast, with Newtonian rules being often defied.

Before, creating something new would cost millions of dollars. The process started with commercial minds, aka MBAs, who’d write a business plan, look for money to support it, and then hire designers and engineers to build the thing. Recently, this MBA-driven model has flipped: first designers and engineers build a thing, then they look for money from VCs or larger organizations, then they write a business plan, and then they move on to hiring MBAs.

A couple of months ago, I started to share this same observation more loudly. In the past, if an organization wanted to bring something new to the market, or just make iteration to the existing offering, it involved a lot of resources, from time, to people, to supporting infrastructure. Only a handful of ideas, after cumbersome fights with processes, budget restrictions, and people (and their egos), got to see the daylight. Change was a luxury.

Nowadays the creators are people who used to be in the shadows, mainly taking instructions from “management” and spinning the hamster wheel they were put on. Now, the “IT crowd” no longer sits in the basements of their offices. They are creating new revenue streams and becoming driving forces within their organizations, or they are rolling out their own businesses as startup founders. There is a whole new breed of technology entrepreneurs thriving on what the cloud offers.

Coming back to the TED talk, Joi brings great examples proving that this new designers/engineers-driven model has pushed innovation to the edges and beyond not only in software development, but also in manufacturing, medicine, and other disciplines. He describes bottom-up innovation as democratic, chaotic, and hard to control, where traditional rules don’t apply anymore. He replaces the demo-or-die motto with a new one: deploy or die, stating that you have to bring something to the real world for it to really count.

He walks us through the principles behind the new way of doing things, and for each of those, without any hesitation, I can add, “and that’s exactly what the cloud enables” as an ending to each statement:

Principle 1: Pull Over Push is about pulling the resources from the network as you need them, rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything. And that’s exactly what the cloud enables.

Principle 2: Learning Over Education means drawing conclusions and learning on the go—not from static information, but by experimenting, testing things in real life, playing around with your idea, seeing what comes out of it, and applying the lessons moving forward. And that’s exactly what the cloud enables.

Principle 3: Compass Over Maps calls out the high cost of writing a plan or mapping the whole project, as it usually turns out not to be very accurate nor useful in the unpredictable world we live in. It’s better not to plan the whole thing with all the details ahead, but to know the direction you’re headed and leave yourself the freedom of flexibility, to adjust as you go, taking into account the changes resulting from each step. And that’s exactly what the cloud enables.

I dare to say that all the above is the true power of cloud without fluff, leaving you with an easy choice when facing the deploy-or-die dilemma.

We’ve all heard nightmare stories about the health care industry. The combination of insurance companies, health care providers, government regulation, and literal “life and death” situations can make for a contentious environment. And with the outdated policies and procedures that permeate the industry, it’s a perfect opportunity for innovation.

When I met Martin Kelly of HealthXL a few months ago, I was intrigued by what he was building. He saw the need for innovation in health care, and he started looking around for the startups that were focusing on these kinds of issues. And while he encountered several groups with a health care focus, no one really took the lead to connect them all together to collaborate or strategize about how startups can really change health care. I mean REALLY change it.

Martin, a former IBMer, is super-passionate about innovation in technology for the health care industry, so he leveraged the IBM network and the relationships he built during his time at IBM to address a few simple questions:

What needs to happen in health care, through technology, to make the experience and the system better for us all?

What is the moonshot that needs to happen for true innovation to happen?

And when those different viewpoints came together, he realized the questions weren’t quite as “simple” as he expected.

Martin invited me to join the conversation for three days at the HealthXL Global Gathering in Dublin to hear what global leaders in the industry are saying about health care. And boy … was I surprised.

To their credit, these leaders (and their respective companies) are very willing and capable to innovate. They feel the pain of heavy administrative responsibilities, often involving duplication and triplication of work. They know how hard it is to track patients from different systems as they change jobs, insurance companies, and providers. They struggle with not being able to communicate effectively with insurance providers. And they fully understand how over-commoditized health care has become as well as its decentralization of focus from patients.

The bottom line: They feel the pain of not having the right technology to run more efficient, cost-effective, and patient-centered health care businesses. They’ve seen the finance industry integrate technology over the past few years, but they're somewhat unsure of what that could look like for them. This can only mean that there are huge opportunities for startups and innovative technologies.

I couldn’t help but consider of how nicely these conversations fit in with the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator powered by our friends at TechStars that @andy_mui and I visited in March. The conversations inside that accelerator are the missing pieces to the conversations that companies like the Cleveland Clinic and Johnson & Johnson were having. Those enterprises have the opportunity to invest in early stage entrepreneurs and born-on-the-Web startups to incubate technologies and solutions that would prove in time to make their businesses more profitable and efficient.

But the biggest opportunity is what that means for patients.

The most telling story to play out over the next 10 years will be whether the largest health care providers and other businesses will approach these market opportunities in pursuit of cultivating a health care system that prioritizes patients. After hearing the conversation at the HealthXL accelerator global summit, that’s the ultimate challenge.

The startup ecosystem is full of entrepreneurs and teams that can deliver on the goal of improving health care while secondarily (and in some cases indirectly) improving the way heath care businesses run. These efficiencies will result in MORE clients, customers, partners, and profitability in the end, but they may require some hefty changes at the outset. Will the industry allow itself to admit what it doesn’t know?

I am excited to see where this goes. In a few years, I think we’re going to consider Martin Kelly as a key builder of this movement, and more and more businesses will be turning to him for answers to the most important of all questions: “How do we do this?”

We’re excited to be able to support Martin and all of the health care startups in the marketplace today. What will the future of health care look like when these innovators and entrepreneurs are done with it?

I'm going into my third year at SoftLayer and it feels like "déjà vu all over again" to quote Yogi Berra. The breakneck pace of innovation, cloud adoption and market consolidation — it only seems to be accelerating.

The BIG NEWS for SoftLayer was announced in July when we became part of IBM. Plenty has already been written about the significance of this acquisition but as our CEO, Lance Crosby, eloquently put it in an earlier blog, "customers and clients from both companies will benefit from a higher level of choice and a higher level of service from a single partner. More important, the real significance will come as we merge technology that we developed within the SoftLayer platform with the power and vision that drives SmartCloud and pioneer next-generation cloud services."

We view our acquisition as an interesting inflection point for the entire cloud computing industry. The acquisition has ramifications that go beyond IaaS market and include both PaaS and SaaS offerings. As the foundation for IBM's SmartCloud offerings, the one-stop-shop for an entire portfolio of cloud services will resonate for startups and large enterprises alike. We're also seeing a market that is rapidly consolidating and only those with global reach, deep pockets, and an established customer base will survive.

With IBM's support and resources, SoftLayer's plans for customer growth and geographic expansion have hit the fast track. News outlets are already abuzz with our plans to open a new data center facility in Hong Kong in the first quarter of next year, and that's just the tip of the iceberg for our extremely ambitious 2014 growth plans. Given the huge influx of opportunities our fellow IBMers are bringing to the table, we're going to be busy building data centers to stay one step ahead of customer demand.

The IBM acquisition generated enough news to devote an entire blog to, but because we've accomplished so much in 2013, I'd be remiss if I didn't create some space to highlight some of the other significant milestones we achieved this year. The primary reason SoftLayer was attractive to IBM in the first place was our history of innovation and technology development, and many of the product announcements and press releases we published this year tell that story.

Big Data and Analytics
Big data has been a key focus for SoftLayer in 2013. With the momentum we generated when we announced our partnership with MongoDB in December of 2012, we've been able to develop and roll out high-performance bare metal solution designers for Basho's Riak platfomr and Cloudera Hadoop. Server virtualization is a phenomenal boon to application servers, but disk-heavy, I/O-intensive operations can easily exhaust the resources of a virtualized environment. Because Riak and Hadoop are two of the most popular platforms for big data architectures, we teamed up with Basho and Cloudera to engineer server configurations that would streamline provisioning and supercharge the operations of their data-rich environments. From the newsroom in 2013:

SoftLayer announced the availability of Riak and Riak Enterprise on SoftLayer's IaaS platform. This partnership with Basho gives users the availability, fault tolerance, operational simplicity, and scalability of Riak combined with the flexibility, performance, and agility of SoftLayer's on-demand infrastructure.

SoftLayer announced a partnership with Cloudera to provide Hadoop big data solutions in a bare metal cloud environment. These on-demand solutions were designed with Cloudera best practices and are rapidly deployed with SoftLayer's easy-to-use solution designer tool.

Cutting-Edge Customers
Beyond the pure cloud innovation milestones we've hit this year, we've also seen a few key customers in vertical markets do their own innovating on our platform. These companies run the gamut from next generation e-commerce to interactive marketers and game developers who require high performance cloud infrastructure to build and scale the next leading application or game. Some of these game developers and cutting-edge tech companies are pretty amazing and we're glad we tapped into them to tell our story:

Asia's hottest tech companies looking to expand their reach globally are relying on SoftLayer's cloud infrastructure to break into new markets. Companies such as Distil Networks, Tiket.com, Simpli.fi, and 6waves are leveraging SoftLayer's Singapore data center to build out their customer base while enabling them to deliver their application or game to users across the region with extremely low latency.

Industry Recognition
SoftLayer's success and growth is a collective effort, however, it is nice to see our founder and CEO, Lance Crosby get some well-deserved recognition. In August, the Metroplex Technology Business Council (MTBC), the largest technology trade association in Texas, named him the winner of its Corporate CEO of the Year during the 13th Annual Tech Titans Awards ceremony.

The prestigious annual contest recognizes outstanding information technology companies and individuals in the North Texas area who have made significant contributions during the past year locally, as well as to the technology industry overall.

We're using the momentum we've continued building in 2013 to propel us into 2014. An upcoming milestone, just around the corner, will be our participation at Pulse 2014 in late February. At this conference we plan to unveil the ongoing integration efforts taking place between SoftLayer and IBM including how;

SoftLayer provides flexible, secure, cloud-based infrastructure for running the toughest and most mission critical workloads on the cloud;

SoftLayer is the foundation of IBM PaaS offerings for cloud-native application development and deployment;

SoftLayer is the platform for many of IBM SaaS offerings supporting mobile, social and analytic applications. IBM has a growing portfolio of roughly 110 SaaS applications.

Joining forces with IBM will have its challenges but the opportunities ahead looks amazing. We encourage you to watch this space for even more activity next year and join us at Pulse 2014 in Las Vegas.

This guest blog was contributed by William Rocca of OS NEXUS. OS NEXUS makes the Quantastor Software Defined Storage platform designed to tackle the storage challenges facing cloud computing, Big Data and high performance applications.

Over the last decade, the creation and popularization of SAN/NAS systems simplified the management of storage into a single appliance so businesses could efficiently share, secure and manage data centrally. Fast forward about 10 years in storage innovation, and we're now rapidly changing from a world of proprietary hardware sold by big-iron vendors to open-source, scale-out storage technologies from software-only vendors that make use of commodity off-the-shelf hardware. Some of the new technologies are derivatives of traditional SAN/NAS with better scalability while others are completely new. Object storage technologies such as OpenStack SWIFT have created a foundation for whole new types of applications, and big data technologies like MongoDB, Riak and Hadoop go even further to blur the lines between storage and compute. These innovations provide a means for developing next-generation applications that can collect and analyze mountains of data. This is the exciting frontier of open storage today.

This frontier looks a lot like the "Wild West." With ad-hoc solutions that have great utility but are complex to setup and maintain, many users are effectively solving one-off problems, but these solutions are often narrowly defined and specifically designed for a particular application. The question everyone starts asking is, "Can't we just evolve to having one protocol ... one technology that unites them all?"

If each of these data storing technologies have unique advantages for specific use cases or applications, the answer isn't to eliminate protocols. To borrow a well-known concept from Physics, the solution lies in a "Unified Field Theory of Storage" — weaving them together into a cohesive software platform that makes them simple to deploy, maintain and operate.

When you look at the latest generation of storage technologies, you'll notice a common thread: They're all highly-available, scale-out, open-source and serve as a platform for next-generation applications. While SAN/NAS storage is still the bread-and-butter enterprise storage platform today (and will be for some time to come) these older protocols often don't measure up to the needs of applications being developed today. They run into problems storing, processing and gleaning value out of the mountains of data we're all producing.

Thinking about these challenges, how do we make these next-generation open storage technologies easy to manage and turn-key to deploy? What kind of platform could bring them all together? In short, "What does the 'Unified Field Theory of Storage' look like?"

These are the questions we've been trying to answer for the last few years at OS NEXUS, and the result of our efforts is the QuantaStor Software Defined Storage platform. In its first versions, we focused on building a flexible foundation supporting the traditional SAN/NAS protocols but with the launch of QuantaStor v3 this year, we introduced the first scale-out version of QuantaStor and integrated the first next-gen open storage technology, Gluster, into the platform. In June, we launched support of ZFS on Linux (ZoL), and enhanced the platform with a number of advanced enterprise features, such as snapshots, compression, deduplication and end-to-end checksums.

This is just the start, though. In our quest to solve the "Unified Field Theory of Storage," we're turning our eyes to integrating platforms like OpenStack SWIFT and Hadoop in QuantaStor v4 later this year, and as these high-power technologies are streamlined under a single platform, end users will have the ability to select the type(s) of storage that best fit a given application without having to learn (or unlearn) specific technologies.

The "Unified Field Theory of Storage" is emerging, and we hope to make it downloadable. Visit OSNEXUS.com to keep an eye on our progress. If you want to incorporate QuantaStor into your environment, check out SoftLayer's preconfigured QuantaStor Mass Storage Server solution.

When Sun Microsystems VP John Gage coined the phrase, "The network is the computer," the idea was more wishful thinking than it was profound. At the time, personal computers were just starting to show up in homes around the country, and most users were getting used to the notion that "The computer is the computer." In the '80s, the only people talking about networks were the ones selling network-related gear, and the idea of "the network" was a little nebulous and vaguely understood. Fast-forward a few decades, and Gage's assertion has proven to be prophetic ... and it happens to explain one of SoftLayer's biggest differentiators.

SoftLayer's hosting platform features an innovative, three-tier network architecture: Every server in a SoftLayer data center is physically connected to public, private and out-of-band management networks. This "network within a network" topology provides customers the ability to build out and manage their own global infrastructure without overly complex configurations or significant costs, but the benefits of this setup are often overlooked. To best understand why this network architecture is such a game-changer, let's examine each of the network layers individually.

Public Network

When someone visits your website, they are accessing content from your server over the public network. This network connection is standard issue from every hosting provider since your content needs to be accessed by your users. When SoftLayer was founded in 2005, we were the first hosting provider to provide multiple network connections by default. At the time, some of our competitors offered one-off private network connections between servers in a rack or a single data center phase, but those competitors built their legacy infrastructures with an all-purpose public network connection. SoftLayer offers public network connection speeds up to 10Gbps, and every bare metal server you order from us includes free inbound bandwidth and 5TB of outbound bandwidth on the public network.

Private Network

When you want to move data from one server to another in any of SoftLayer's data centers, you can do so quickly and easily over the private network. Bandwidth between servers on the private network is unmetered and free, so you don't incur any costs when you transfer files from one server to another. Having a dedicated private network allows you to move content between servers and facilities without fighting against or getting in the way of the users accessing your server over the public network.

It should come as no surprise to learn that all private network traffic stays on SoftLayer's network exclusively when it travels between our facilities. The blue lines in this image show how the private network connects all of our data centers (find our most up-to-date data center map here) and points of presence:

To fully replicate the functionality provided by the SoftLayer private network, competitors with legacy single-network architecture would have to essentially double their networking gear installation and establish safeguards to guarantee that customers can only access information from their own servers via the private network. Because that process is pretty daunting (and expensive), many of our competitors have opted for "virtual" segmentation that logically links servers to each other. The traffic between servers in those "virtual" private networks still travels over the public network, so they usually charge you for "private network" bandwidth at the public bandwidth rate.

Out-of-Band Management Network

When it comes to managing your server, you want an unencumbered network connection that will give you direct, secure access when you need it. Splitting out the public and private networks into distinct physical layers provides significant flexibility when it comes to delivering content where it needs to go, but we saw a need for one more unique network layer. If your server is targeted for a denial of service attack or a particular ISP fails to route traffic to your server correctly, you're effectively locked out of your server if you don't have another way to access it. Our management-specific network layer uses bandwidth providers that aren't included in our public/private bandwidth mix, so you're taking a different route to your server, and you're accessing the server through a dedicated port.

If you've seen pictures or video from a SoftLayer data center (or if you've competed in the Server Challenge), you probably noticed the three different colors of Ethernet cables connected at the back of every server rack, and each of those colors carries one of these types of network traffic exclusively. The pink/red cables carry public network traffic, the blue cables carry private network traffic, and the green cables carry out-of-band management network traffic. All thirteen of our data centers have the same colored cables in the same configuration doing the same jobs, so we're able to train our operations staff consistently between all thirteen of our data centers. That consistency enables us to provide quicker service when you need it, and it lessens the chance of human error on the data center floor.

The most powerful server on the market can be sidelined by a poorly designed, inefficient network. If "the network is the computer," the network should be a primary concern when you select your next hosting provider.

With the global economy in its current state, it's more important than ever to help inspired value-creators acquire the tools needed to realize their ideas, effect change in the world, and create impact — now. I've had the privilege of working with hundreds of young, innovative companies through Catalyst and our relationships with startup accelerators, incubators and competitions, and I've noticed that the best way for entrepreneurs to create change is to simply let them play! Stick them in a sandbox with a wide variety of free products and services that they can use however they want so that they may find the best method of transitioning from idea to action.

Any attention that entrepreneurs divert from their core business ideas is wasted attention, so the most successful startup accelerators build a bridge for entrepreneurs to the resources they need — from access to hosting service, investors, mentors, and corporate partners to recommendations about summer interns and patent attorneys. That all sounds good in theory, and while it's extremely difficult to bring to reality, startup-focused organizations like MassChallenge make it look easy.

During a recent trip to Boston, I was chatting with Kara Shurmantine and Jibran Malek about what goes on behind the scenes to truly empower startups and entrepreneurs, and they gave me some insight. Startups' needs are constantly shifting, changing and evolving, so MassChallenge prioritizes providing a sandbox chock-full of the best tools and toys to help make life easier for their participants ... and that's where SoftLayer helps. With Kara and Jibran, I got in touch with a few MassChallenge winners to get some insight into their experience from the startup side.

Tish Scolnik, the CEO of Global Research Innovation & Technology (GRIT), described the MassChallenge experience perfectly: "You walk in and you have all these amazing opportunities in front of you, and then in a pretty low pressure environment you can decide what you need at a specific moment." Tish calls it a "buffet table" — an array of delectable opportunities, some combination of which will be the building blocks of a startup's growth curve. Getting SoftLayer products and services for free (along with a plethora of other valuable resources) has helped GRIT create a cutting-edge wheelchair for disabled people in developing countries.

The team from Neumitra, a Silver Winner of MassChallenge 2012, chose to use SoftLayer as an infrastructure partner, and we asked co-founder Rob Goldberg about his experience. He explained that his team valued the ability to choose tools that fit their ever-changing and evolving needs. Neumitra set out to battle stress — the stress you feel every day — and they've garnered significant attention while doing so. With a wearable watch, Neumitra's app tells you when your stress levels are too high and you need to take a break.

Jordan Fliegal, the founder and CEO of CoachUp, another MassChallenge winner, also benefited from playing around in the sandbox. This environment, he says, is constantly "giving to you and giving to you and giving to you without asking for anything in return other than that you work hard and create a company that makes a difference." The result? CoachUp employs 20 people, has recruited thousands of judges, and has raised millions in funding — and is growing at breakneck speed.

If you give inspired individuals a chance and then give them not only the resources that they need, but also a diverse range of resources that they could need, you are guaranteed to help create global impact.

As most have seen by now, this morning we announced IBM's intent to acquire SoftLayer. It's not just big news, it's great news for SoftLayer and our customers. I'd like to take a moment and share a little background on the deal and pass along a few resources to answer questions you may have.

We founded SoftLayer in 2005 with the vision of becoming the de facto platform for the Internet. We committed ourselves to automation and innovation. We could have taken shortcuts to make a quick buck by creating manual processes or providing one-off services, but we invested in processes that would enable us to build the strongest, most scalable, most controllable foundation on which customers can build whatever they want. We created a network-within-a-network topology of three physical networks to every SoftLayer server, and all of our services live within a unified API. "Can it be automated?" was not the easiest question to ask, but it's the question that enabled us to grow at Internet scale.

As part of the newly created IBM Cloud Services division, customers and clients from both companies will benefit from a higher level of choice and a higher level of service from a single partner. More important, the real significance will come as we merge technology that we developed within the SoftLayer platform with the power and vision that drives SmartCloud and pioneer next-generation cloud services. It might seem like everyone is "in the cloud" now, but the reality is that we're still in the early days in this technology revolution. What the cloud looks like and what businesses are doing with it will change even more in the next two years than it has in the last five.

You might have questions in the midst of the buzz around this acquisition, and I want you to get answers. A great place to learn more about the deal is the SoftLayer page on IBM.com. From there, you can access a FAQ with more information, and you'll also learn more about the IBM SmartCloud portfolio that SoftLayer will compliment.

A few questions that may be top of mind for the customers reading this blog:

How does this affect my SoftLayer services?
Between now and when the deal closes (expected in the third quarter of this year), SoftLayer will continue to operate as an independent company with no changes to SoftLayer services or delivery. Nothing will change for you in the foreseeable future.

Your SoftLayer account relationships and support infrastructure will remain unchanged, and your existing sales and technical representatives will continue to provide the support you need. At any time, please don't hesitate to reach out to your SoftLayer team members.

Over time as any changes occur, information will be communicated to customers and partners with ample time to allow for planning and a smooth transition. Our customers will benefit from the combined technologies and skills of both companies, including increased investment, global reach, industry expertise and support available from IBM, along with IBM and SoftLayer's joint commitment to innovation.

Once the acquisition has been completed, we will be able to provide more details.

What does it mean for me?
We entered this agreement because it will enable us to continue doing what we've done since 2005, but on an even bigger scale and with greater opportunities. We believe in its success and the opportunity it brings customers.

It's going to be a smooth integration. The executive leadership of both IBM and SoftLayer are committed to the long-term success of this acquisition. The SoftLayer management team will remain part of the integrated leadership team to drive the broader IBM SmartCloud strategy into the marketplace. And IBM is best-in-class at integration and has a significant track record of 26 successful acquisitions over the past three years.

IBM will continue to support and enhance SoftLayer's technologies while enabling clients to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio, including SmartCloud Foundation, SmartCloud Services and SmartCloud Solutions.

Think of the many components of our cloud infrastrucutre as analogous to LEGO bricks. If our overarching vision is to help customers "Build the Future," then our products are "building blocks" that can be purposed and repurposed to create scalable, high-performance architecture. Like LEGO bricks, each of our components is compatible with every other component in our catalog, so our customers are essentially showing off their Master Model Builder skills as they incorporate unique combinations of infrastructure and API functionality into their own product offerings. Cedexis has proven to be one of those SoftLayer "Master Model Builders."

As you might remember from their Technology Partner Marketplace feature, Cedexis offers a content and application delivery system that helps users balance traffic based on availability, performance and cost. They've recently posted a blog about how they integrated the SoftLayer API into their system to detect an unresponsive server (disabled network interface), divert traffic at the DNS routing level and return it as soon as the server became available again (re-enabled the network interface) ... all through the automation of their Openmix service:

They've taken the building blocks of SoftLayer infrastructure and API connectivity to create a feature-rich platform that improves the uptime and performance for sites and applications using Openmix. Beyond the traffic shaping around unreachable servers, Cedexis also incorporated the ability to move traffic between servers based on the amount of bandwidth you have remaining in a given month or based on the response times it sees between servers in different data centers. You can even make load balancing decisions based on SoftLayer's server management data with Fusion — one of their newest products.

The tools and access Cedexis uses to power these Openmix features are available to all of our customers via the SoftLayer API, and if you've ever wondered how to combine our blocks into your environment in unique, dynamic and useful ways, Cedexis gives a perfect example. In the Product Development group, we love to see these kinds of implementations, so if you're using SoftLayer in an innovative way, don't keep it a secret!